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Originally Posted by leebase
It's just that Lovelock failed so hard in being the "soul joining" experience I normally feel when reading an OSC book. The type of story, the arc of the story...yep...typical OSC. But the TELLING of the story? Not so much.
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Narrative voice is the most distinctive element of a good writer's work and the hardest to ghost. Anybody familiar with a prolific writer can quickly tell when they're mailing it in or being ghosted.
Now Patterson, because of his narrative formula, is just about the easiest author to ghost. Odds are we'll be treated to "new" Patterson stories long after he dies.
Clancy is also easy because of the style of his books, most of which he didn't write, anyway.
Card, as noted, is hard.
He has a fairly idiosyncratic voice and his typical story structure is also distinctive.
It takes a skillful writer in their own right to emulate many of the writers out there. Especially those who don't write the standard "serious writer" voice taught in most modern writing classes.
KKR has a really good piece on voice:
https://kriswrites.com/2016/02/03/bu...-writer-voice/
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I noted something as I read. Most of the stories had the same voice and tone. What do I mean by that? I mean they read like they’d been written by the exact same person.
It was always a joy—it is always a joy—to “hear” a new voice, a voice that doesn’t sound like anyone else. I could tell without looking at the byline when I hit a Joyce Carol Oates or Megan Abbot or Michael Connelly story. The Strand found an original F. Scott Fitzgerald story and published it last year, and Fitzgerald’s voice—unlike any other—came through loud and clear.
A lot of the stories I read this past year had wonderful plots. They had great characters and lovely twists. The stories were published, remember, and so they all had something unusual, something strong.
But that something generally wasn’t voice.
And now I’m reading manuscripts for an anthology that should be all voice. Every story should sound so different from every other story as to be unrecognizable. Think of it like accents or word usage: As I read, I should be seeing Texas accents and idioms in one story, Australian accents and idioms in the next, and Scottish accents and idioms in the next.
Instead, I get mostly what I call “serious writer voice.”
Serious writer voice is carefully bland. It will include a few setting details, some nice descriptions, maybe a few unique words. But mostly, it is indistinguishable from any other voice. Rather like the way we used to train broadcasters in this country.
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